Articles on Brandon Castellano

Software Minimalism

Tue, 10 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

For my long-lived open source projects, I really do strive for:

minimal dependencies
simple interface
things should work cross platform (at minimum Linux, Windows, and macOS)
batteries should always be included
no unnecessary size bloat

Shipping software is easier if you’re your own customer, or you care about a single platform. It gets much harder when you have to meet “the bar” for other people on arbitrary machines and operating systems.

A fresh start: GUIs, a new design, and plans for the site

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Hey everyone, it’s been a while. I’m still not entirely sure what I want to post on this website, but I do want to expand outside of electronics. Eventually I’d like to get a photo gallery going, and maybe some short articles on making things.

A lot has happened since I last wrote any material for this site, as it’s been over 14 years now! I want to start writing more though, even about the minor tips and tricks we all re-discover each day. If for nothing more than just posterity and to help anyone else who might need it.

How does word length affect the performance and operation of a CPU?

Wed, 17 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

About a year ago, I came across a question on Super User titled “How much faster is a 64-bit CPU than a 32-bit CPU?”, which was promptly closed and deleted since it’s a very open ended question. However, the author (a software developer) referred to benchmarks regarding system performance in 32-bit versus 64-bit. The purpose of this blog post is to investigate how the performance of a computer is affected, as a function of the word length.

Fixing the XAnalogTV Screensaver

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

A few days ago, I discovered the awesome XAnalogTV screensaver included with XScreenSaver. I was very impressed with the visuals, which include a very accurate simulation of a conventional “tube” television implementing the analog NTSC TV standard. There was just one problem - I couldn’t get XAnalogTV to fill my screen.

In the above screenshot, pay attention to the edges of the screen. For some reason, the way the scaling/clipping was implemented caused the clipped portions on the screen’s edges to simply not be drawn (as they should be drawn or cleared to pure black). This causes the screensaver to look quite odd, especially when there’s perfectly drawn digital graphics being rendered behind the wonderful analog “snow”. I found this only happens when the aspect ratio of the XAnalogTV window was very different than 4:3. Thus, in my quest for beautifully simulated analog graphics, I set out to fix this error.